With the advent of globalisation of economies enterprises are more viewed as "products" themselves. If they are green field compaies, they have to be designed, built and put into operation. If the enterpises already exist, changes have to be specified, designed and carried out.
To design enterprises for their entire life-cycle we need fundamental principles and complex tools and methodologies. Those, who build machines and electric devices have been developing and using design tools for a long time. The big difference is in complexity by a number of magnitudes. The tools needed for enterprise integration therefore are not just more complex, but entirely different.
Enterprises keep changing. Nothing is permanent in the business, manufactuirng practice, organisational structure or in the information technology infrastructure of an enterprise. Not even for months. The design of an enterprise may take a long time and involve many people. As a matter of fact enterprises change more often than the design of any other product. So their models and descriptions have to be changed too.
Previous research carried out by the AMICE Consortium on CIM-OSA, by the Purdue Consortium on PERA, and by the GRAI Laboratory on GIM, (and similar methodologies by others) have produced many fine results. the Generic Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology (GERAM), as presented here, defines a toolbox of concepts for designing and maintaining enterprises for their entire life-cycle - it is meant for use in a dynamic environment of change. GERAM is a new framework which encapsultes and orders the previously mentioned systems providing an overall structure to use those methods and modelling techniques - as made available by others.
GERAM is thus not a yet another new proposal for enterprise reference architectures, but a framework which is meant to organise exisiting enterprise integration knowledge instead of re-defining it.
The developers of previously published reference architecture proposals are thus able to retain their own identity, while identifying through GERAM the overlaps and complementing benefits with others.
GERAM is about those methods, models and tools which are needed to build the integrated enterprise. The architecture is generic because it applies to most, potentially all types of enterprise.
The scope of the architecture is therefore the union of domains which need the attention of enterprise engineering and development. Thus the scope is defined through a pragmatic need, the need to design and redesign as well as continuously improve the functioning of enterprises.